13 January 2012 2:22 PM

Divorce can be disastrous. But where children are involved never getting married is far worse

An open letter to Sir Paul Coleridge.

Sir Paul,

I salute you.

I have nothing but admiration for your standing up, speaking out and lambasting contemporary casual attitudes to marriage, divorce and birth out of wedlock.

Like you I am sure that all three, plus cohabitation break up and multiple partnering, are part and parcel of the same meltdown; that the attitudes and values driving their statistics stem from the sex revolution and the birth of the ‘me’ generation.

Unlike you though, I see the disappearance of marriage, not divorce, as the critical problem.

Societies can live with divorce – just - as they have lived with infidelity. But the comparative sociology of marriage tells us we jettison it at our peril. Across its various forms and rules it is a human universal and with good reason. Marriage everywhere is the bridge between affinal and kin relationships – a bond integral to the functioning and survival of human society. It defines social relationships, social and economic responsibilities. It establishes genealogical connections and confers ‘belonging’ and social identity. It prevents incest – now more prevalent in our underclass than we know (something of deep concern to the more thoughtful of our politicians and social workers). No other set of relationships or connections – whether through friendship, work, sport or volunteering - replicate the function of marriage. The state certainly cannot – the failure of communism demonstrated that.

Unlike you I believe governments (successive ones) are culpable for setting marriage adrift as the sexual/ cultural revolution swept in. This was not the case elsewhere.

Britain silently, casually and progressively abolished the family – yes first through liberalising the divorce laws; later came the official signal that marriage no longer mattered.

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson's reform of personal taxation set in train the abolition of the married couple's allowance. (He failed, as he had planned in his Green Paper, to balance independent taxation by transferring the unused personal allowance to a non-earning, most likely child-rearing, spouse.)

But it was Gordon Brown's first budget that did the real damage. It marked, as Harriet Harman emphasized triumphantly at the time, "the end of the assumption that families consist of a male breadwinner and a female helpmate in the home". Labour's new measures did not just recognise that women were in paid work and needed help with childcare, they pushed this agenda aggressively with tax incentives and a massive expansion of childcare facilities.

Married mothers at home were indeed marked as second class citizens. What’s more their families were to subsidise, through their disproportionately burdensome taxes, those families with no breadwinner at all. Frank Field’s intention to cut back on lone-parent benefits in order to discourage dependency was abandoned in the face of party fury and threatened rebellion.

State support for lone parenthood has entrenched illegitimacy – the word no one dares speak. This is our root social problem. It is why we are now Europe’s pre-eminent ‘transient shack up’ society. We cannot rest the entire blame on the pill per se (available across Europe) or on women’s lib. Betty Friedman and Germaine Greer (both made their way onto most European bookshop shelves) or cultural osmosis, though feminism and socialism have proved a pernicious mix.

The fact is other countries in Europe have done more to support and sustain marriage and married families. They have capitulated less to aggressive feminist ideologues – people who viewed marriage as the tool of an oppressive patriarchal regime, if not as prostitution (Jenni Murray in the past) but never as an institution the majority of young women continued to aspire to.

That marriage socialised men, and that women had power in marriage, did not occur to this particular monstrous regiment of women. Nor did men marshal the arguments against this craziness, for fear of falling foul of irrational and strident Gingerbread demands for lone parent economic independence - courtesy of the state of course.

Whatever cost to the state and taxpayer - subsidising lone mothers back to work, putting their fatherless children into state paid for childcare and continuing to mop after what were never viable families in the first place, whether in the form of Louise Casey or Sure Start, remains the mantra of left and most of the centre of politics.

Now through a linguistic conceptual ploy these subsidies have been morphed into an irresistible new policy – a commitment to lifting children out of poverty. A policy no self respecting politician, left, right or centre, dare gainsay though an impossible and unending task; one that given the status quo, will keep leftwing poverty wonks in business for years making a rod for every Conservative’s government’s back.

Yes government(s) has been very much to blame. They have proved cavalier, spineless or ignorant in the matter of marriage.

So what good an independent commission on marriage and divorce would do? Hardly any if it were drawn from the Quangoland of political correct family and childhood experts (with ‘all inclusive’ definitions of the family, no one to be ‘stigmatised’ please) that have burgeoned in the last 12 years, many of whom helped get us in this mess in the first place.

Making divorce harder is hardly the answer. We would just get new armies of mediators and more prolongation of agony and argument for children, courtesy of guess who but the taxpayer, again.

Making marriage more attractive and more feasible however is. In fact it is the only viable way forward. It means more than a cash incentive for newly married. It means re-asserting the value of marriage to society and its importance to children’s well being and taking promotion of marriage policy as seriously as in many US States.

It means thinking the unthinkable, reversing three generations of pro single parent policies, bringing marriage through the tax system within the economic reach of everyone, including the poorest and setting clear future sanctions for childbirth out of wedlock, putting adoption, and mother and baby homes, for those who cannot independently support their child, clearly back in the frame.

Frank Field was right in 2002 when he said: “Welfare influences behaviour by the simple device of bestowing rewards (benefits) and allotting punishments (loss of benefits). With a third of central Government expenditure allocated by welfare, payments on this scale play an important part on setting down the general ground rules for society’s behaviour. The nature of our character depends in part on the values which welfare fosters.

How very wrong we’ve got these rewards and benefits is there for all to see.

Only with such radical change – a policy based on an understanding that responsible married families should no longer be made to subsidise irresponsible or dysfunctional other ones – will we begin to see an end to the ‘the mess left by the decline of marriage’.

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